Meme Revival

What we are seeing here in the homestretch of the 2014 midterm elections is the desperate resuscitation of an aging meme at the expense of a craft that I still value. Among the curators of Our National Dialogue, it was plainly obvious 18 months ago that the Democratic party was on the way to losing its Senate majority. The electoral map was bad. It was the midterm election in the second term of a Democratic incumbent, and the party of the incumbent president rarely does well in situations like that, unless it's 1998 and the country wants to tell people to stop chasing the incumbent's penis all over the Beltway. This was a not unreasonable position. The only fly in the ointment was the ever-present danger that the country might notice that many of the Republican candidates were nutty. Not Christine O'Donnell nutty, but chewy clusters of crazee on their own. Among other respectable pundit precincts, Tiger Beat On The Potomac went very long on this theory.

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Then, some people noticed that very thing, particularly in Iowa, and then some other weird stuff happened. Republican incumbents in places like South Dakota and Kansas found themselves threatened by third-party alternatives. Democratic candidates in places like Arkansas, North Carolina, Georgia and, yes, Iowa ran strong campaigns, while the Republican challengers stumbled. The Senate Minority leader couldn't shake off a well-financed challenger. The meme looked a little weak and faltering. It was time to make it strong again. And then we saw one of those remarkable moments in which the keepers of Our National Dialogue moved to shore up their own endangered credibility, thereby reviving the meme. Instead of being a demonstration that Joni Ernst's entire previous political career was built on fringe bushwah, her ability to "distance" herself from these positions was presented as a demonstration of how politically deft she is. Out in Colorado, Cory Gardner, who has spent every second of his time in politics as a proud anti-choice loon, is now ahead of incumbent Mark Udall at least in part because of the credit Gardner has accrued for shrewdly "softening" his long history of extremism. That this might be naked opportunism seems lost in the narrative somewhere. I don't think it's entirely out of line to believe that a lot of people in my business need the Senate to change hands in November to vindicate how smart they were in February.

Take, for example, the preposterous case of the Denver Post, which gave its endorsement to Gardner over the weekend after having endorsed Udall in his previous campaigns. In doing so, the Post may have presentedthe most singularly box-of-rocks dumb rationale I ever read in my life.

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In every position the Yuma Republican has held over the years - from the state legislature to U.S. House of Representatives - he has quickly become someone to be reckoned with and whose words carry weight. An analysis on ABC News' website, for example, singled out Gardner a year ago - before he declared for the Senate - as one of the party's "rising stars" who represented "a new generation of talent" and who had become a "go-to" member of leadership. And this was about someone who wasn't elected to Congress until 2010. Nor is Gardner a political time-server interested only in professional security. He is giving up a safe seat in the House to challenge a one-term Senate incumbent, Democrat Mark Udall, in what is typically an uphill effort. It's time for a change.

Surely, the inherent absurdity of this argument punches you right in the nose. The reason government is dysfunctional, and the reason nothing gets done, is because the Republican party, of which Gardner is a "rising star," and the Republican leadership in the Congress, of which Gardner is a "go-to" member, resolved from the start not to allow a Democratic president to govern as such. So, here, the Post is arguing that the only solution to that kind of vandalism is to elect enough vandals that it succeeds.

Rather than run on his record, Udall's campaign has devoted a shocking amount of energy and money trying to convince voters that Gardner seeks to outlaw birth control despite the congressman's call for over-the-counter sales of contraceptives. Udall is trying to frighten voters rather than inspire them with a hopeful vision. His obnoxious one-issue campaign is an insult to those he seeks to convince.

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Because nothing says "inspirational" like pitching the privacy rights of 51 percent of the population overboard.

If Gardner's past is any guide, he would very likely match Bennet's influence in the upper chamber, providing Colorado with a powerful one-two punch and pairing two young, energetic senators with clout on both sides of the aisle. If Gardner wins, of course, it could mean the Senate has flipped to Republicans. However, that doesn't mean it will simply butt heads with President Obama as the Republican House has done. As The Wall Street Journal's Gerald Seib recently pointed out, "A look back shows that eras of evenly divided power - Congress fully controlled by one party, the presidency by the other - have turned out to be among the most productive" because both sides temper their policies.

And the Denver Post is edited by five-year olds. In case they missed it, the Republicans in the Senate have "butted heads" with the administration with the same kind of enthusiasm that the House has. There have been an unprecedented number of filibusters. We have no Surgeon General at the moment. Seats on the federal bench are vacant and, on that point, Harry Reid got so fed up that he changed the rules of the Senate. Ted Cruz led the government shutdown from the Senate, not the House. This is a seamless strategy of obstruction in both houses of Congress and the notion that the Republicans will become more reasonable in the majority than they were in the minority is enough to make you wonder if the editorial board of the Post is paid every week with a bag of magic beans.

If Gardner had been a cultural warrior throughout his career, we would hesitate to support him, because we strongly disagree with him on same-sex marriage and abortion rights. But in fact he has emphasized economic and energy issues (and was, for example, an early supporter among Republicans of renewable energy).

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Non sequitur. Your facts are uncoordinated. (Thank you, Nomad)

For that matter, his past views on same-sex marriage are becoming irrelevant now that the Supreme Court has let appeals court rulings stand and marriage equality appears unstoppable. And contrary to Udall's tedious refrain, Gardner's election would pose no threat to abortion rights.

Now, it's possible that there are local factors involved in the Post's trafficking in this nonsense. (A journalist buddy out there attributes it to a last flare of Dean Singleton's influence, since Singleton still has clout on the editorial page.) But what I see is an attempt to self-validate a meme that is still in a little trouble, and some obvious pre-emptive beat-sweetening in anticipation of a Republican majority. You're going to see a lot more of this over the next three weeks, perhaps enough of it to make it all a self-fulfilling prophecy. But there's too much stuff going on below the surface to call it journalism.

UPDATE -- Distinction between candidates and incumbents now correct. Thanks to Top Commenters

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